“The process of training an AI system immediately raised questions about the importance of attribution and remuneration in this area. What most people understand Artificial Intelligence to be is just us, in aggregate — often behind the spectacular results of machine learning systems lies a database of uncredited and uncompensated labor.”
Here’s a collaboration between Herndon and her AI named Spawn.
“The results of their paper expose just how flawed our current security systems are. The neural networks the two trained initially identified over 95% of the normal, everyday deepfakes. But when they perturbed the images, the detectors were able to catch (checks notes) zero percent.”
And if you’re going for quality you’re going to need deepfake actors.
Yes, Senator Lee, but republicanism is supposed come with Republican virtue. Not only is the current Republican party without virtue, it seems to actively pursue criminality, immorality, and unethical behavior. Nor does it actively support ‘negative’ liberty (freedom from government interference). Otherwise the Republican party would be the party of decriminalizing cannabis, and ending government interference in same-sex marriage, and women’s reproductive rights. They would also be the party of encouraging voting and civic participation, instead of the party of voter suppression. It may be that many of the founders wanted to see a republican nation, but the Republican party does not reflect those republican values.
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I need a search engine that will give me a results list of only websites without advertising.
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Ignore the title (which should more accurately be written “Fascist Revolution is a Fascist Concept”), and the annoying interstitial ‘quote’ graphics. This is an excellent introduction to Rosi Braidotti. Somehow, she only appeared on my radar this year. She is awesome.
Wow, I can’t remember the last time I looked at BoingBoing. Probably not 10 years, but eight maybe? Seven?
Anyway, my feed knows me and alerted me to this post by Gareth Branwyn about Dark Shadows. Like Branwyn, I have fond memories from childhood. However, I wasn’t rushing home from school, I was still too young. My memory is that my aunt would visit occasionally (she must have been a teenager then) and would want to watch Dark Shadows.
I was captivated because there was a child character named David. I think that’s also where my childhood interest in blue whales started (the Blue Whale was the name of the local bar).
In 2012 I decided to revisit the series and watched all the pre-Barnabas episodes and fell head over heels. I love that show. I especially love the pre-Barnabas episodes (though as a child I was infatuated with Jonathan Frid).
This summer I watched the 1990s remake, which I thought was a pretty good adaptation.
I think it’s all available through Amazon Prime, and there are probably worse ways to while away a pandemic than watching this one-of-a-kind soapy goth. (For some reason I especially love the introductory voice-over that opened each episode.) If you want some idea of what to expect Branwyn points to this 2019 article from Syfy covering the major plotlines that developed over six seasons.
Even now this landscape is assembling. The hills darken. The oxen sleep in their blue yoke, the fields having been picked clean, the sheaves bound evenly and piled at the roadside among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:
This is the barrenness of harvest or pestilence. And the wife leaning out the window with her hand extended, as in payment, and the seeds distinct, gold, calling Come here Come here, little one
I was a 15-year old no-goodnik and concerts were a way to escape parental supervision and enjoy the good things in life – cheap pot, cheap beer, and painfully loud rock and roll.
I remember wearing that concert t-shirt for years. I’m not sure why, but it was important to have the “baseball t-shirt” style with the 3-quarter sleeves.
I stopped listening to Van Halen when David Lee Roth left the group. I was not a Hagar fan. In fact, by the time Hagar joined up I probably wasn’t much of a Van Halen fan. Women and Children First was the last album of theirs I ever bought.
It’s hard to believe Eddie was only 10 years older than me. When I was a 15-year old doofus whipping my long hair to his guitar solos, he was a 25-year old rock god.
If you want a taste of that experience, here’s a bootleg taken from the same tour.
It’s hard to watch a video like the one below, and not think of Spinal Tap, but it sure meant a lot to me when I was younger and dumber than today.
Adios, Eddie. Thanks for rocking my teenage heart.
“Late last year, the U.S. military branch announced a program called “Agility Prime” seeking to turn commercial advances with flying cars into military applications. Set up like a DARPA Challenge, the Air Force released a preliminary solicitation this week for the kinds of vehicles companies can submit for the first stage of Agility Prime — these being electric or hybrid-powered eVTOL aircraft with autonomous, remote, or onboard-pilot controls.”
Periodically I drop into the DARPA page to see what shenanigans they’re up to. And every time I’m struck with the thought – imagine what the world would look like if research universities and medical research facilities were getting all that money funneled into the military.
“Also, I dislike schedules and responsibilities. There was a time in my life when I could put up with that — while raising children, mostly — but I find in later life that I travel a lot just for the joy of avoiding chores through not being around. I like to wake up when I feel like it, and follow my own proclivities through the day.
“This likely sounds pretty alarming to writers with a firmer work-ethic, but I’m not indolent, I’m just not always commercially productive as a team player.”
“You may work for six days, but the seventh day is a day of worship, a day when you don’t work. It is holy to the LORD. Whoever works on that day must be put to death.”
Sounds to me like ‘religious liberty’ allows me to murder people working on the sabbath. And, if I don’t have that religious liberty, then any appeal to religious liberty is really a tissue-thin cover for bigotry.
“Given the tremendous exposure to the emotions of others on digital media, the contagious spread of digital emotions seems to be having a powerful impact on user emotions and behavior”
While walking this morning my brain mulled over the intersection of the gig economy and AI, trying to figure out what this new class of AI curation will look like for the precariat.
In the paper the authors provide a few design-fiction scenarios, including, A case study of gig workers as responsible moral centres of semi-automated systems, as well as this glorious bit of imaginary scholarly future research:
“Auto-writing and deep-research software enables app-tutors (normally academic staff and unemployed graduates) to co-write up to 400 student dissertations simultaneously, costing between £250 – £1100 per essay (Stuart & Shatner 2028, Teacheroober 2026). Academic support apps were banned for final year students at Sony TRUMP University in 2028. Research showed that these students have worse post-grad employment outcomes in the first month (Teacheroober et al. 2029). Here, we examine the impact of the ban on staff.”
Bates, Oliver & Remy, Christian & Nash, Callum & Kirman, Ben. (2019). The future of techno-disruption in gig economy workforces: challenging the dialogue with fictional abstracts. HTTF 2019: Proceedings of the Halfway to the Future Symposium 2019. 1-4. 10.1145/3363384.3363476.
And then, while browsing the web at lunch I came across ANTHROPOCENE: An A.I. Opera by Michael Green.
“ANTHROPOCENE: An A.I. Opera” follows the story of EVA, a post human cyborg prophet, and BLADE, a security droid officer, and their survival after a major cataclysmic event. Blade arrested Eva for her possession of her FreeThought upload mind software, but the two were forced to work together after a swarm of meteors struck the Earth. BLADE takes EVA to the abandoned Biodome, with the objective to find their technocratic ruler, “NEURO”, in hope to reprogram his mission objectives, and build a New Earth Utopian model, with the use of nanotechnology, that will reign peacefully for the next 1000 years.
“ANTHROPOCENE was composed with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The music was generated using A.I. software, where the composer has control over Articulation Melodic role, Dynamics, Register, Polyphony and Different Chord Notes. The thematic concepts of the lyrical content was pre arranged by the composer, and generated through the use of GPT-2, a text generating model. Once the lyrical content of the Opera was completed, it was fed through voice synthesizer software. The software synthesizes singing by typing in lyrics and melody.”
I expect we’ll see a lot more AI/human collaborations over the next few years.
I wonder when MLA, APA, Chicago, etc. will add citation styles for acknowledging which AI you used in the creation of your work.
I’m a middle-aged, middle-class able white guy living in the US. Like many in my demographic I’ve been indifferent to my health for most of my life.
Until last year!
Last year a co-worker, about ten years older than me, had a serious, life-changing health event. “Regular check-ups,” his doctor told him, “would have allowed you to catch this much earlier.” At one point one of his doctors (who, whom?, he quickly dropped) told him to get his affairs in order because he was probably going to die. (Spoiler alert: he didn’t die.)
I took a cue from his experience and visited a doctor for the first time in about a decade (which in turn was the first visit in about a decade). Turns out I have two common, but potentially serious, health concerns: high cholesterol and high blood pressure.
Which means it’s time for a major, mid-life re-vamping of my diet.
In my youth, every time I ate a burger, or a pizza, or drank beer, or over-consumed fatty and fried foods, I knew the day would come when I wouldn’t be able to consistently indulge, and ignore the detrimental health effects of overdoing the salt, fat, and sugar. That day has arrived.
And, one of the big changes in my diet is more fruit.
“That’ll cause indigestion,” one of my friends said when I told him. And, frankly, that was my first thought as well. But the tummy upset only lasted a couple of days and now I’m a fruit-eating machine. The DASH diet recommends five helpings a day. I typically hit between 3 and 5 every day. That’s a lot of fruit!
“In the name of God, now I know how it feels like to BE God!”
Frankenstein trivia – apparently the original line about being God was cut after the initial release due to the newly powerful censorship board.
“The PCA, however, felt that this was not enough and removed Frankenstein’s likening himself to God from the movie. In order to hide the cut, thunder is used. For many years, the version of the scene that people saw had the thunder instead of the last half of the line. As a result, what’s persisted as a trope is “It’s alive!” punctuated with dramatic thunder.”
This summer I watched nearly all the Universal horror movies, starting with the Lon Chaney movies of the silent era. I couldn’t bring myself to watch the Abbot & Costello installments, however. If I was forced to watch only a single movie for the rest of my life, the original Frankenstein might be that movie.
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Tor.com is serializing Charlie Jane Anders Never Say You Can’t Survive, and the latest installment maps almost perfectly on my own experience.
Weirdness Gives Me the Strength To Keep Going – “The way I think about weirdness has changed completely of late. I used to think of strange and surreal art as a siege weapon—a cannon aimed at the walls of conformity and structural oppression and well-of-course-ness.
“But lately? I think of strange art as a source of reassurance and safety. A cozy blanket made out of nice fuzzy WTF.”
Anders also introduces me to the term ‘sweetweird,’ which I hope is a soon-to-be booming SFF genre.
At some point Dan Piraro, author of the cartoon Bizarro, fell off my radar. I noticed that he turned over responsilities of the daily cartoon to Wayno at some point, but didn’t give it a second thought. Turns out he’s creating a new strip called Peyote Cowboy, which is pretty cool.
